by James Axler
Peering back to where the excited dog was looking, Rosalia saw another man pacing along the street, this one more upright with an almost military gait. Magistrate, she said to herself automatically. He had a shaved head, the start of a beard on his chin, and, as he came closer, Rosalia saw that his right ear was mangled where it had suffered some kind of wound. As she watched him pass, Rosalia saw the man lift his hand to his ear as if in pain.
“I can hear you, Domi,” the tall man said as though to thin air. “Stop blabbering in my fucking ear.”
Domi? Rosalia knew that name; it was another of the Cerberus people, the ones she had met with here just a few months before. Domi had been the curious-looking girl with the pure white skin. She had been a hellion, Rosalia recalled, savage in her manners and brutal in her fighting techniques—an outlander, uncivilized despite her outward affectations.
Which didn’t explain who the man with the bullet-bitten ear was, although it did heavily imply that he was part of the Cerberus team. They all communicated using some kind of internal electronic device, she knew, had seen it with her own eyes. Keeping her distance, Rosalia padded after the shaved-headed man, the pale-eyed mongrel at her side.
AT A LOWER LEVEL OF the favela, Domi had decided to follow the alleyway she had found by the jaunty chicken keeper. She engaged her Commtact communicator once again, trying to raise Edwards, but the response was the same as before—which was to say, there was no response.
“Come on, Edwards,” Domi growled as she trotted past a crate of rotten fruit that three young children were busily picking through. The children wore no clothes, and they glared at Domi with feral eyes as she passed them. Ignoring them, Domi continued up the winding passageway between tumbledown dwellings.
“Cerberus?” Domi said, engaging the hidden pickup in her skull. “This is Domi. I need a favor.”
A moment later, the cool voice of Brewster Philboyd, one of the mainstay operatives at the Cerberus redoubt, came back over the subdermal relay, pumping straight through Domi’s mastoid bone. “I read you, Domi. What’s going on?”
“I’ve lost Edwards,” Domi explained as she danced beneath a low rail stretched across the narrow alley, a handful of clothes upon it having been left to dry in the sun. “Do you think you could use his transponder to give me a fix on his location?”
Over the Commtact link, Brewster Philboyd confirmed that he was doing so now. Transponders were implanted beneath the skin of each member of the Cerberus team, broadcasting a telemetric signal that provided the Cerberus nerve center with a constant stream of information about an individual’s health, including heart rate, blood pressure and brain-wave activity. At a keystroke, these blips could be expanded to give full diagnostics for each member of a field team. With satellite triangulation, the transponders could also be used to track down an individual to within almost a hairbreadth of their actual physical location.
“So, how did you lose him anyway?” Philboyd asked as he brought forward Edwards’s data feed.
“He went out for some fresh air and, um, gave us the slip,” Domi explained a little self-consciously.
“Gave you the…?” Brewster sounded faintly amused. “I didn’t realize Edwards was a prisoner.”
“He’s not,” Domi agreed. “Which is why his disappearing like this is all the more worrying.”
“Okay, okay,” Philboyd mused, speaking as if to himself. “Right, I’ve got Edwards tagged now. He’s westbound, heading in roughly the direction of the ocean. By my reckoning, you’re about three-quarters of a mile from his current location.”
“Which way?” Domi asked, picking up speed as she hurried down the seemingly endless, foul-smelling alleyway.
“You’re heading north just now,” Philboyd told her. “You want to turn left as soon as you can and keep roughly to that course.”
“Okay,” Domi agreed as she saw a gap between two of the broken-down huts. She rushed through the gap, ducking beneath a jutting strut of metal and weaving past a group of young mothers discussing something or other while they rocked their babies in their arms. The babies bawled incessantly, and the mothers ignored them, peering instead at the ghostly, chalk-white figure of Domi as she darted past them.
Brewster’s rich voice came over the Commtact again as Domi headed on through the shanty ville. “I’ve just brought up the live satellite feed now, Domi,” he explained. “That place is nothing shy of a maze and you’re heading for a dead end.”
“Dammit,” Domi cussed. “See if you can raise Edwards from your side, while I find myself another route.”
As she spoke, Domi reached the end of the current pathway, just as Philboyd had warned. A high wall loomed before her, its brickwork covered in damp lichen of a putrescent green shade with tiny mauve buds. To her left stood a ramshackle collection of aluminum cladding and wooden crates, somehow balanced together to create a rainproof structure—give or take a leak—within which dwelled a family of seven. Above the dwelling, a tin-can chimney contentedly chuffed billowing black smoke from the family’s tiny cooking stove. To Domi’s right, a similar building stood, its makeshift walls leaning at uncomfortable angles, apparently propping itself up in spite of the desires of gravity.
It was instinct, nothing more than that, but Domi felt certain that Edwards was in trouble. Assessing the two dwellings to either side of her, the albino woman reached up to the roof sill of the one to her left and sprang, her legs kicking out as she ran up the wall, pulling herself to the roof.
A holler of complaint came from the people below, but Domi ignored it. From up there, just one story above the ground, she could see across the immediate area. There were numerous run-down shacks, with smoking chimneys made from old piping or cans. The street plan, such as it was, was a labyrinthine mess of lefts and rights, abrupt stops in the roads where a new family of refugees from the destroyed villes had moved in and set up their home. But up here, on the rippled rooftop of corrugated iron, Domi could see a far easier way to travel through the run-down favela.
“Domi?” Brewster’s voice came to her ear. “I’ve tried Edwards, but I’m having no success. A remote test shows his Commtact seems to be working. He just doesn’t appear to be responding.”
Ignoring the complaints coming from the grubby street below, Domi strode across the rooftop, speeding up to a run as she reached its end. “What does the transponder show?” she asked Brewster over the Commtact link. “Is he conscious?” As she spoke, Domi leaped from the rooftop to that of the next building. From there she kept running, moving with long strides of her bonewhite legs, her pace quickening.
“He’s moving,” Brewster mused, “but that’s not a definite sign he’s awake. Stand by, I’m bringing up a full bio scan now.”
Domi ran, her feet pounding lightly against the hollow roofs as she rushed over the heads of Hope’s shanty ville populace. A moment later she had found a lower section of the moss-smeared wall, leaping over it in a single bound, her legs scissoring like a high jumper as she flung herself over the obstacle and headed west. On the other side, the petite albino woman found another rooftop, this one made of rain-damp wood. She ran onward, listening to Brewster’s voice as she made her way toward the coast.
EDWARDS WAS STILL TREKKING after the silent, hooded figures he had found himself drawn to while he was administering medicines to the locals. There was something about them, he knew, something eerily familiar; he just couldn’t place it. The irritating pain in his head didn’t help matters, either.
Just then, Brewster Philboyd’s voice reverberated in his skull via the Commtact, requesting that he respond and state his position.
“Hey, Brewmeister,” Edwards said, keeping his voice low so as not to attract too much attention. “I’m…um—” he peered up at the position of the sun “—heading west, I think, following a group of suspects.”
Edwards waited for Philboyd to acknowledge, but nothing happened.
“Suspects,” Edwards repeated. “Perps. Whatever you non-Mags c
all them. People, weirdos. You getting this?”
Again there was no reply.
Irritably, Edwards continued along the shingle road between run-down tenements, wondering why his home base wouldn’t respond. After all, they had called on him, not vice versa.
“Come on, Cerberus,” he muttered, “answer the damn call.”
Behind Edwards, stalking through the shadows, Rosalia followed the broad ex-Mag, her pale-eyed dog loping along at her heels. Rosalia wasn’t being particularly subtle, she knew, and yet the wide-shouldered man seemed oblivious to his tail, as though his mind was too caught up on other things. She hurried along the street, her booted feet splashing the puddles that littered the pockmarked road.
“Okay, Magistrate man,” she muttered, “let’s see what you’ve got.”
DOMI LEAPED THROUGH the air, bouncing from rooftop to rooftop like some out-of-control jack-in-the-box as she rushed through the shanty dwellings that lay at the outskirts of the fishing ville.
“Brew?” she asked between breaths as she leaped the gap between two more buildings. “You have that heads-up on Edwards’s status yet?”
“Sorry about that, Domi. He’s conscious,” Philboyd responded after a moment. “His transponder is showing live brain activity and his heart is beating as normal. I just got a consult to double-check I was reading it right.”
Bounding down from a two-story shack, Domi hit the ground running, weaving through a crowd of customers at a makeshift market stall as they bartered for the local produce. By the smell of it, the produce was already on the turn, but Domi had no time to consider that any further. “So he’s alive,” Domi said, “conscious and his Commtact appears to be operational. Any ideas what’s going down?”
“I’m bringing in satellite surveillance now,” Brewster responded over the radio link. “There’s a crowd gathering out there, close to the coast. Keep on track and I’ll guide you.”
“How far?” Domi asked.
“You’ll be there shortly,” Brewster judged. “Take the next right and head up toward the hills.”
Domi took the next right as instructed. Whatever Edwards was involved in, he had better have a damn fine excuse for breaking contact.
THE HOODED FIGURES IN the distance had stopped, amassing in a block of scrubland that overlooked the ocean. Edwards halted to watch them, and Rosalia also halted so that she could watch both him and the figures in the hoods.
Other people seemed to be appearing from all around now, drawn to the hooded group as they waited. Some of them carried the pebbles that the people had dropped like calling cards all over the ville. Within a few minutes, the watching crowd had to have become forty or fifty strong, waiting in near silence for whatever it was to proceed.
Edwards made his way along the rearmost edge of the crowd, sticking to the shadows of an uneven wall, one eye on the hooded figures while he took in the faces here. They seemed to have been drawn here, called by something unseen, just as he had been. He reached for his face, rubbing at his forehead where that dull ache resided.
Suddenly, one of the six figures began to speak, a powerful orator, his voice carrying clearly over the crowd that had amassed.
“Come one, come all,” he said. “Everyone is welcome here. This is where all salvation starts. Shall we begin?”
The crowd cried its assent, anticipation rising.
“We come among you today,” the hooded leader explained, “to bring you utopia. A paradise that you cannot begin to imagine. But before we start, I must ask a question.”
Edwards stopped walking as he reached the edge of the wall that hid him, turning to face the speaker. The man reached his hands up and pulled back the low-hanging hood that had obscured his face. Around him, his five colleagues did likewise. Edwards narrowed his eyes, seeing something on each man’s forehead, a circle no larger than a fingerprint.
“Who here already bears the mark?” the leader asked.
Several members of the crowd stepped forward, both men and women. They were the same people who had been following the group from down in the favela.
“Come now,” the leader called, “there are more of you, I’m sure. There’s no need to be shy.”
Almost against his will, Edwards found himself stepping forward, edging away from a dead tree he had found himself standing beside, stepping away from the shattered wall. He could feel himself being drawn to the speaker, feel the man’s hypnotic call inside his head. A part of him wanted to join the group, and—worse—that part of him seemed to be making the decision for the rest of him.
Edwards wasn’t the only one. Others were emerging from the crowd, pushing their way to the front.
Suddenly a woman’s voice spoke close by to Edwards’s ear, just as he was about to make his way out from the wall and into the crowd.
“Sorry, Cerberus, but you’re cramping my style.”
Edwards felt a heavy blow to his head then, and he collapsed to his knees, before sprawling forward, a trickle of blood pouring down the side of his face from where the woman had struck him with a fallen branch from the tree. As Edwards’s consciousness flickered and dimmed, the last thing he saw was the lithe, olive-skinned woman striding away, hiding herself among the crowd, her mongrel dog trotting along faithfully at her side.
AS DOMI HURRIED UP the mud steps toward the road that Philboyd was indicating over the Commtact link, the man’s voice came to her again.
“Domi, we may have a problem,” Philboyd stated from his position at the Cerberus redoubt in Montana.
“Go ahead, Cerberus,” Domi instructed, her hand automatically reaching to check that her Detonics Combat Master handgun was still in its holster at her hip.
“Edwards’s transponder just flatlined,” Brewster explained. “He’s either lost consciousness or—”
“Don’t say it, Brewster,” Domi ordered. “I’ll be there soon enough.” As she hurried up the steep steps, Domi just hoped that wasn’t as ambitious a statement as it sounded to her own ears right now.
Chapter 14
Roughly twelve miles beneath the surface of the Pacific, two Cerberus Manta craft glided gracefully through the water toward the cruciform structure that waited at the bottom of the sea. After their tangle with the giant squidlike creatures, both pilots remained alert and cautious of what was going on all around them, and the tension in the cockpits of both vehicles was acute.
The whole approach was done using the heads-up sensor display and guided by an automated system that seemed to already know the position and entry route for the docking gateway that resided on one side of the immense coral-like cross.
Sitting behind Grant in the tiny passenger seat of the compact cockpit, Clem let out a long sigh of relief as he peered through the slit windows at the near total darkness.
Hearing this, Grant offered a note of reassurance. “Almost there now, Clem,” he said.
“I feel like we just went ten rounds with the kraken of legend,” the oceanographer said, sounding genuinely exhausted.
Grant loosed a single, sharp bark of laughter as he guided the Manta along the final approach. He could see from the sensor display that Kane was following in his own craft and there were no more sea monsters out there—at least for now. “Brigid called them librarians,” Grant explained.
It was Clem’s turn to laugh then, and it was the fulsome sound of relief. “The kraken was a fearsome beast, a sea monster,” he explained, “that was said to roam the oceans around Norway and Iceland. Modern interpretations suggest that the kraken really was some kind of giant squid that generally made its home in the ocean depths.”
“Sounds like our librarian, all right,” Grant agreed.
Clem shook his head in astonishment, though Grant was too busy concentrating on the controls to see. “You’re completely unfazed,” Clem said in amazement. “You—the three of you—do this kind of thing a lot, don’t you?”
“Define ‘a lot,’” Grant replied as the Manta floated through a wide, coral archway with
in the cruciform structure.
A moment later they found themselves dipping even lower as Grant followed the tunnel beyond the archway, keeping to a slow, steady pace as his sensor array began bringing up reams of new information.
“Have entered some kind of tunnel construction,” Grant informed Kane over the Commtact.
Kane’s voice came back a moment later: “I’ve got your back, buddy. Entering the structure now.”
The tunnel continued to sink, dropping at a thirty-degree angle as it burrowed beneath the ocean bed. Peering through the back windowpanes, Clem was delighted to see that the walls were visible, lit sporadically by some kind of phosphorescent moss that grew upon the walls in shades of pinks and orange-reds, the color of a peach’s skin.
“It looks like a magical grotto,” Clem said in wonder.
Up ahead of him, Grant peered past the heads-up display information, looking through the windshield at the otherworldly sight of the cavern that they were slowly traveling through. Clem was right; it really did look like something magical, like an illustration from a child’s storybook. The tunnel’s uneven walls seemed to twinkle with the strange lighting as the Manta followed its mysterious path.
“Do you realize,” Clem said, the reverence clear in his tone, “that we are probably deeper beneath the ocean than any human has ever been?”
Grant eased up a little on the thrust to the engines, letting the Manta glide as the tunnel began to rise steeply once again. A moment later they found themselves emerging from the water in what appeared to be a vast cavern, filled with air and once again lit by the strange glowing lichen that clung to the walls in its obscure patterns. The cavern featured a huge circular pool in its center from which the Manta had emerged, with a border of flattened rock at its edges that led to an opening on the far side of the cave, its entryway approximately six feet across. To Grant’s surprise, there were three Manta craft already waiting at the edges of the pool, their blisterlike cockpits drawn back and showing them to be unoccupied.